Google's AI Can Now Identify What It's Seeing In Videos And It's Frighteningly Perceptive

Welcome to our new robots overlords.
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It was vision, not limbs, that led fish on to land, according to a groundbreaking study of evolution published this week.

But let’s hope it’s neither vision nor limbs that leads artificial intelligence to make its own evolutionary breakthrough.

Boston Dynamics has recently unveiled a robot that puts our human limbs to shame – and now Google has announced a major step forward for AI vision.

With the aid of machine learning, the tech giant’s Cloud Video Intelligence API can recognise objects in videos, and it’s frighteningly astute.

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Google

Announcing the breakthrough at Google’s Next Cloud Conference, the company’s chief scientist for cloud AI, Fei-Fei Li, showed how the API could ‘watch’ a commercial and identify not only a daschund in the ad, but also that the video was a commercial, The Verge reported.

In a further example in a blog, Google showed how the API was able to identify that a video (see above) featured a tiger and that it’s living in a zoo.

The tool will let people search through videos for specific objects, Google said. Such a task previously required manual tagging.

The API follows in the footsteps of a number of other Google tools that empower AI. Li explains: “These APIs let customers build the next generation of applications that can see, hear and understand unstructured data.”

It’s impressive and alarming in equal measures.